A new study from Lean In and McKinsey shows the pervasiveness of sexual harassment at the office and the persistence of inequality. That isn’t a coincidence.
What has been less apparent, though, is how harassment and the gender gap are inextricably linked. In fact, management experts and executives say, harassment can be a direct side effect of a workplace that slights women on everything from pay to promotions, especially when the perception is that men run the show and women can’t speak up.
Putting more women into executive ranks where they can have a greater collective voice goes hand-in-hand with making workplaces feel safer and more inclusive
.. “You can’t separate them,” she says. “When women see other women in a position of leadership, it reframes what they think is possible to them.”
.. Among women in technical roles, 45% reported experiencing harassment, while 55% of women in senior positions did.“This is about power,” says Rachel Thomas, president of LeanIn.Org, the nonprofit founded by Facebook Inc.’s Sheryl Sandberg to support women in their career ambitions. “And there is still a dramatic power imbalance in the workplace.”
.. One in five women say they are often the only, or one of the only, women in the room or a meeting—and women commonly in those situations are at greater risk of harassment and more subtle forms of discrimination.. “I joke that I chose a career where there’s no line for the bathroom,” says Kate Mitchell.. “Decisions get made in the men’s room,” she says. “Do you follow them into the men’s room? Do you put your ear against the wall? Many times, it was easy to hear and so when they came out, I’d just start up the conversation” where they’d left off... there are signs #MeToo is having an effect. Corporate hotlines have lit up since Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein became the first of dozens of powerful men to be toppled by harassment allegations last October... Microsoft Corp. , Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. have scrapped agreements that forced employees to resolve harassment claims in arbitration hearings rather than in open court... cracked down on a frat-house work culture by banning alcohol in the office... One thing managers spotted and changed was that there wasn’t always a woman on the job-interview team. That could both discourage female applicants and contribute to biased hiring decisions.. To help get the conversation going, Ms. Steinberg told the group how, early in her career at another company, one of the most senior men cornered her in the copy room and groped her breast. Though she told her then-boss, they concluded the man held so much power that she would be better off not pressing the matter.“I think back on it and still feel humiliated,” she says. At Zenefits, “we need to make sure employees know they have a voice.”.. Another frequent question: whether hugging a colleague is still all right... While nearly 60% of men say gender diversity is a high priority at their companies, only 44% of women do. Men are also more likely to worry the diversity focus will make their workplaces less of a meritocracy. In fact, one in seven say they worry that being a man will make it harder for them to advance... That could include efforts as small as highlighting a point a woman made in a meeting if someone interrupts her, or, if a colleague repeats her idea without giving her credit, pointing out that she raised it first.. create succession plans for their positions, and each has to include at least one woman and a person with a minority background. That motivates bosses to make sure those candidates get the experience and support they need to be viable potential successorsIn the past, “everything we did was a program, this thing on diversity or this thing on unconscious-bias training,” Mr. Schlifske says. “I don’t think those are bad, but I just never saw those work if you didn’t add something in the workplace that was more day-to-day kind of stuff.”
Inside the Race for the Top Job on Wall Street
After college, Mr. Schwartz got into finance. His first day on a trading floor was Oct. 19, 1987. The stock market plunged 22 percent on what came to be known as Black Monday. He remembers a colleague crying.
“If you’re around that environment, I don’t know anybody that couldn’t be sensitized to the cyclical nature of the markets,” Mr. Schwartz said. It left him with a permanent sense of jitters over how easily capital can be destroyed.
.. “He’s always been a good shepherd internally in terms of managing risk and balancing that with clients’ interests,”
.. Mr. Schwartz is cautious and can be tightly scripted. As a general rule, he waits 48 hours to collect his thoughts before addressing someone who has really annoyed him.
Some colleagues say he has a tendency to “mark to market” his underlings — meaning that, in accounting terms, he assesses their value to his objectives and treats them accordingly. That has frustrated some people.
.. In the early 1990s, Mr. Solomon joined Bear Stearns, where he helped run the bank’s junk bonds division, working with bankers and salespeople to devise and sell higher-risk bonds. At one point, he helped a Dallas movie theater company, which was struggling to finance its expansion into Mexico, raise money through a complicated bond transaction.
.. In 1997, Mr. Solomon worked alongside Jon Winkelried, then the co-head of Goldman’s bond division, on a deal to raise money for the Venetian resort in Las Vegas. Mr. Winkelried was impressed with Mr. Solomon’s handling of the deal and offered him a job running Goldman’s leveraged finance team, again raising capital for companies through higher-risk bonds. It was a rare instance of Goldman hiring an outsider and awarding him the rank of partner.
.. “I thought he was on the leadership track at Bear,
.. Once, he showed up to pitch for the Lululemon Athletica initial public offering wearing a maroon jacket and long sweatpants made by the brand. His colleagues were similarly outfitted. “Everyone on the other side of the table is in suits and ties,” Mr. Solomon recalled. “It threw people off.” Goldman won a lead role on Lululemon’s I.P.O.
.. Mr. Solomon also leaned on executives in Goldman’s human resources office to hire far more women. Given the nearly even split in society, he argued, there was no reason that Goldman’s ranks should not be equally balanced between men and women. He has taken that message on the road, too.
Trump threatens to break the glass on DOJ succession plan
The little-noticed document is usually only applicable in the event of an attack or crisis.
That has legal experts closely examining the dry executive order to figure out who might be next up to bat, or, as Democratic lawyers and consultants view it, who might serve as Trump’s next sacrificial lamb.
.. “We know Rachel Brand is the next victim,”
.. “For those of us who have high confidence in Rachel — the more confidence you have in someone in this role, the less long you think they’ll last,”
.. Typically, the solicitor general would be next in line after the associate attorney general, followed by the list of five assistant U.S. attorneys, the order of which would be determined by the attorney general. But none of those individuals have been confirmed by the Senate, and they would be unable to serve as acting attorney general without Senate confirmation.
.. Because of that, the executive order comes into play — one that puts next in line after Brand the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Dana Boente.
- .. Boente, who was briefly thrust into the no. 2 spot at the Justice Department after Yates was fired, was also tasked with phoning Preet Bharara, then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to deliver the unexpected news that he was fired. At the time, Boente also vowed to defend Trump’s travel ban in the future.
- .. Eastern District of North Carolina, John Stuart Bruce; and the U.S. attorney for the
- Northern District of Texas, John Parker.
.. Trump’s desire to rid himself of Mueller, at potentially any cost
.. The president, who friends said does not enjoy living in Washington and is strained by the demanding hours of the job, is motivated to carry on because he “doesn’t want to go down in history as a guy who tried and failed,” said the adviser. “He doesn’t want to be the second president in history to resign.”
Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
After running Microsoft for 25 years, Bill Gates handed the reins of CEO to Steve Ballmer in January 2000. Ballmer went on to run Microsoft for the next 14 years. If you think the job of a CEO is to increase sales, then Ballmer did a spectacular job. He tripled Microsoft’s sales to $78 billion and profits more than doubled from $9 billion to $22 billion. The launch of the Xbox and Kinect, and the acquisitions of Skype and Yammer happened on his shift. If the Microsoft board was managing for quarter to quarter or even year to year revenue growth, Ballmer was as good as it gets as a CEO. But if the purpose of the company is long-term survival, then one could make a much better argument that he was a failure as a CEO as he optimized short-term gains by squandering long-term opportunities.
How to Miss the Boat – Five Times
Despite Microsoft’s remarkable financial performance, as Microsoft CEO Ballmer failed to understand and execute on the five most important technology trends of the 21stcentury:
- in search – losing to Google;
- in smartphones – losing to Apple;
- in mobile operating systems – losing to Google/Apple;
- in media – losing to Apple/Netflix;
- and in the cloud – losing to Amazon.
Microsoft left the 20th century owning over 95% of the operating systems that ran on computers (almost all on desktops). Fifteen years and 2 billion smartphones shipped in the 21st century and Microsoft’s mobile OS share is 1%. These misses weren’t in some tangential markets – missing search, mobile and the cloud were directly where Microsoft users were heading.
.. Execution and Organization of Core Businesses
It wasn’t that Microsoft didn’t have smart engineers working on search, media, mobile and cloud. They had lots of these projects. The problem was that Ballmer organized the company around execution of its current strengths – Windows and Office businesses. Projects not directly related to those activities never got serious management attention and/or resources.For Microsoft to have tackled the areas they missed – cloud, music, mobile, apps – would have required an organizational transformation to a services company. Services (Cloud, ads, music) have a very different business model. They are hard to do in a company that excels at products.
Ballmer and Microsoft failed because the CEO was a world-class executor (a Harvard grad and world-class salesman) of an existing business model trying to manage in a world of increasing change and disruption. Microsoft executed its 20th-century business model extremely well, but it missed the new and more important ones. The result? Great short-term gains but long-term prospects for Microsoft are far less compelling.
.. Visionary CEOs are product and business model centric and extremely customer focused.
The best are agile and know how to pivot – make a substantive change to the business model while or before their market has shifted. The very best of them shape markets – they know how to create new markets by seeing opportunities before anyone else.
.. Between 2001 to 2008, Jobs reinvented the company three times. Each transformation – from a new computer distribution channel – Apple Stores to disrupting the music business with iPod and iTunes in 2001; to the iPhone in 2007; and the App store in 2008 – drove revenues and profits to new heights.
.. They know who their customers are because they spend time talking to them. They use strategy committees and the exec staff for advice, but none of these CEOs pivot by committee.
.. One of the strengths of successful visionary and charismatic CEOs is that they build an executive staff of world-class operating executives (and they unconsciously force out any world-class innovators from their direct reports). The problem is in a company driven by a visionary CEO, there is only one visionary. This type of CEO surrounds himself with extremely competent executors, but not disruptive innovators
.. When visionary founders depart (death, firing, etc.), the operating executives who reported to them believe it’s their turn to run the company (often with the blessing of the ex CEO). At Microsoft, Bill Gates anointed Steve Ballmer, and at Apple Steve Jobs made it clear that Tim Cook was to be his successor.
Once in charge, one of the first things these operations/execution CEOs do is to get rid of the chaos and turbulence in the organization. Execution CEOs value stability, process and repeatable execution. On one hand that’s great for predictability, but it often starts a creative death spiral – creative people start to leave, and other executors (without the innovation talent of the old leader) are put into more senior roles – hiring more process people, which in turn forces out the remaining creative talent
.. As process oriented as the new CEOs are, you get the sense that one of the things they don’t love and aren’t driving are the products (go look at the Apple Watch announcements and see who demos the product).
.. The problem is that a supply chain CEO who lacks a passion for products and has yet to articulate a personal vision of where to Apple will go is ill equipped to make the right organizational, business model and product bets to bring those to market.
.. The dilemma facing the boards at Microsoft, Apple or any board of directors on the departure of an innovative CEO is strategic: Do we still want to be a innovative, risk taking company? Or should we now focus on execution of our core business, reduce our risky bets and maximize shareholder return.
Tactically, that question results in asking: Do you search for another innovator from outside, promote one of the executors or go deeper down the organization to find an innovator?
.. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (and 20th century’s other creative icon -Walt Disney) shared the same blind spot: They suggested execution executives as their successor
.. if the board decides that the company needs another innovator at the helm, you can almost guarantee that the best executor – the number 2 and/or 3 vice president in the company – will leave, feeling that they deserved the job. Now the board is faced with not only having lost its CEO, but potentially the best of the executive staff.
.. The irony is that in the 21st century, the tighter you hold on to your current product/markets, the likelier you will be disrupted
.. Increasingly, a hands-on product/customer, and business model-centric CEO with an entrepreneurial vision of the future may be the difference between market dominance and Chapter 11.
Summary:
- Innovation CEOs are almost always replaced by one of their execution VPs
- If they have inherited a powerful business model this often results in gains in revenue and profits that can continue for years
- However, as soon the market, business model, technology shifts, these execution CEOs are ill-equipped to deal with the change – the result is a company obsoleted by more agile innovators and left to live off momentum in its twilight years